From Eric Jon Phelps
Dear Brother Kirk,
I am sick at the moment but feel it is necessary that I respond.As you know, the Turks are nice to westerners on the outside; inside they are secretive and suspicious---and with good reason. Turkey was created out of the parceled-up Ottoman Empire at the Treaty of Versailles. They regard it as theft of the greatest magnitude, as would I.
What they do not know as that the last Sultan (who was also a freemason) and Knight of Malta King George V worked together to bring about the Ottoman Empire's loss of WWI. Both worked together during the Armenian and Assyrian massacres of Orthodox Christians---Rome using Islam to kill "heretics and liberals." Remember at about the same time (1917), the Turks fired not one shot when General Allenby entered Jerusalem. Leaflets were dropped and the Turks, well---they just faded away because someone gave that order! Thus, the Jesuits used their apostate White Protestant British Empire to end their Sunni-Islamic Ottoman Empire. They needed Jerusalem to be inhabited by Jews in order to build the Third Hebrew Temple. And according the Pierre van Paassen's Days of Our Years, this was Haj Amin al Husseini's greatest fear while it was that thug who was appointed Grand Mufti by one of the Pope's court Jews, England's acting Lord High Commissioner for Palestine, Herbert Samuel.
Now, Turkey is to never be admitted into the European Union---never! One of the first indications of this was Turkey's attack on Cyprus in 1974, stealing nearly one half of the island. The Turkish northern half is trashed, while the Southern Greek Orthodox half is quite prosperous and beautiful. This was done at the height of the Cold War. Why? Suppossedly, Greece and Turkey were allies against the superhuman Soviet Threat! The fact is Cyprus belongs to the Turks and was torn away from Turkey at Versailles. Turkey wants it back---and is going to have all of the island as this present 12th crusade against Islam unfolds. I maintain, all of Cyprus is a consolation prize for not being admitted into the pope's EU. That EU is to be Islamic free. The reason Rome has brought the Muslims into Europe is to unite the Whites against a common enemy once driven to desperation. Berlin is called "Little Istanbul" and the Germans are fuming about it!
Well, if Turkey has no future with the condemned US and the the coming superpower of the EU, then were shall she go? Into the arms of Mother Russia, and this is exactly what the Prophet Ezekiel declares (Ezekiel 38). Togarmah is Turkey. Therefore, we can begin to observe a gradual move away from the EU (especially with the Gulen movement) and towards Moscow. This alliance will be solidified when the US is blamed for blowing Mecca, Medina and the Jerusalem Mosques---in fact to be blown by the Saudis serving the Jesuit Papacy via Freemasonry and the king being a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece which is a noble Roman Catholic Order.
After this present crusade, the US, Canada and Mexico (NAU) will be partitioned by the victors (Sino-Soviet-Muslim alliance); the Pope's EU will be complete and referred to as Shengen; the Far East will be united by Japan and China (including Austraila); and Africa will be united by a Black king subject to the Pope. But what most Bible readers are missing is the identification of the kingdom of the beast (Rev. 16:10) with its capital city being rebuilt Babylon (Rev. 18). Thus, the high Jesuits running the Jesuit Papacy have decided to demolish the three mosques sacred to Islam as per above. In exchange for the willing sacrifice, the high Islamic Freemasonic leaders will be given a fabulous new kingdom, the beginning of which is Dubai. The construction projects throughout Baghdad by American contractors is unbelievable---unless you understand this grand design.
I trust this is helpful.
Lord Bless,
Brother Eric
To: eric@vaticanassassins.org
Sent: Wednesday, July 07, 2010 3:57 PM
Subject: Turkey
Hi Eric, I have listened to much of your information and understand what you have emparted on your listeners and how this relates to those 'running the show'. My wife's family is are Turkish (I am western) and they are very educated and very nice, respectful people. They are I guess 1 level 'below' the aristocracy and decision makers of Turkey. This means I have 'some' level of contact on a social level with captains of industry, CEO's, ex-Ministers, politicians, Governers, Mayors, so I meet those who are themselves close to current Cabinet Ministers etc, even close enough to get on the phone to the P.M. Without mentioning names... Many or even most of these gentlemen are clearly high level Grand Orient/Muslim brotherhood members, given one can clearly observe handshakes etc.
They are very nice gentlemen and I respect them very much on an individual basis. They are secular and not in agreement with the AK Parti in power, but appreciate that political stability is "good for business".
As a bible believer who understands the 'end game' so often written about, prophecised about, and drummed into even blue lodge family in the West (rebuilt Solomons Temple with risen Horis, anti-messiah etc) I would like your opinion on where you see Turkey headed in the near/medium term and why. I understand who the defacto rulers of Turkey are, who runs things out of Cairo, and who runs that (and so on up the pyramid with all roads leading to...) so no need to window dress any response. I also have listened to Mr Riviera and agree in theory with what he was told by his boss, so you will not shock or offend on that issue. This is personal for me, as I respect the Turkish people and I care about the direction (east, south east, gulen movement, bagdad caliphate?) the current administration is taking the country. Timelines, names, any specifics would be invaluable to me. I am also well respected by these gentlemen, who are 'near' the inner circle (including the dynastic families of Turkey) so I'm only 1-2 degrees removed from the movers and shakers (so to speak). So any accurate, fact based information you provide/confirm can easily be provided in a discrete and trustworthy manner to these individuals. You would be surprised how well received I am in certain circles. I understand this email is no doubt flagged somehow in alphabet agencies, with possible future ramifications for me which I understand are real and serious, but God doesn't give a spirit of fear, so I must not also and I pray this message reaches you safe and that the power of the holy spirit surrounds us both and protects us.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Obama Administration Opposes Internet Freedom of Speech
'Change' need not be for the better.
Obama Information Czar Calls For Banning Free Speech
Sunstein: Taxation and censorship of dissenting opinions “will have a place” under thought police program advocated in 2008 white paper
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, January 14, 2010
The controversy surrounding White House information czar and Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein’s blueprint for the government to infiltrate political activist groups has deepened, with the revelation that in the same 2008 dossier he also called for the government to tax or even ban outright political opinions of which it disapproved.
Sunstein was appointed by President Obama to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an agency within the Executive Office of the President.
On page 14 of Sunstein’s January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” the man who is now Obama’s head of information technology in the White House proposed that each of the following measures “will have a place under imaginable conditions” according to the strategy detailed in the essay.
And what does Sunstein define as “conspiracy theories” that should potentially be taxed or outlawed by the government? Opinions held by the majority of Americans, no less.
The notion that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing JFK, a view shared by the vast majority of Americans in every major poll over the last ten years, is an example of a “conspiracy theory” that the federal government should consider censoring, according to Sunstein.
A 1998 CBS poll found that just 10 per cent of Americans believed that Oswald acted alone, so apparently the other 90 per cent of Americans could be committing some form of thought crime by thinking otherwise under Sunstein’s definition.
Sunstein also cites the belief that “global warming is a deliberate fraud” as another marginal conspiracy theory to be countered by government action. In reality, the majority of Americans now believe that the man-made explanation of global warming is not true, and that global warming is natural, according to the latest polls.
But Sunstein saves his most ludicrous example until last. On page 5 he characterizes as “false and dangerous” the idea that exposure to sunlight is healthy, despite the fact that top medical experts agree prolonged exposure to sunlight reduces the risk of developing certain cancers.
To claim that encouraging people to get out in the sun is to peddle a dangerous conspiracy theory is like saying that promoting the breathing of fresh air is also a thought crime. One can only presume that Sunstein is deliberately framing the debate by going to such absurd extremes so as to make any belief whatsoever into a conspiracy theory unless it’s specifically approved by the kind of government thought police system he is pushing for.
Despite highlighting the fact that repressive societies go hand in hand with an increase in “conspiracy theories,” Sunstein’s ’solution’ to stamp out such thought crimes is to ban free speech, fulfilling the precise characteristic of the “repressive society” he warns against elsewhere in the paper.
“We could imagine circumstances in which a conspiracy theory became so pervasive, and so dangerous, that censorship would be thinkable,” he writes on page 20. Remember that Sunstein is not just talking about censoring Holocaust denial or anything that’s even debatable in the context of free speech, he’s talking about widely accepted beliefs shared by the majority of Americans but ones viewed as distasteful by the government, which would seek to either marginalize by means of taxation or outright censor such views.
No surprise therefore that Sunstein has called for re-writing the First Amendment as well as advocating Internet censorship and even proposing that Americans should celebrate tax day and be thankful that the state takes a huge chunk of their income.
The government has made it clear that growing suspicion towards authority is a direct threat to their political agenda and indeed Sunstein admits this on page 3 of his paper.
That is why they are now engaging in full on information warfare in an effort to undermine, disrupt and eventually outlaw organized peaceful resistance to their growing tyranny.
Obama Information Czar Calls For Banning Free Speech
Sunstein: Taxation and censorship of dissenting opinions “will have a place” under thought police program advocated in 2008 white paper
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, January 14, 2010
The controversy surrounding White House information czar and Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein’s blueprint for the government to infiltrate political activist groups has deepened, with the revelation that in the same 2008 dossier he also called for the government to tax or even ban outright political opinions of which it disapproved.
Sunstein was appointed by President Obama to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an agency within the Executive Office of the President.
On page 14 of Sunstein’s January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” the man who is now Obama’s head of information technology in the White House proposed that each of the following measures “will have a place under imaginable conditions” according to the strategy detailed in the essay.
1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing.That’s right, Obama’s information czar wants to tax or ban outright, as in make illegal, political opinions that the government doesn’t approve of. To where would this be extended? A tax or a shut down order on newspapers that print stories critical of our illustrious leaders?
2) Government might
impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such
theories.
And what does Sunstein define as “conspiracy theories” that should potentially be taxed or outlawed by the government? Opinions held by the majority of Americans, no less.
The notion that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing JFK, a view shared by the vast majority of Americans in every major poll over the last ten years, is an example of a “conspiracy theory” that the federal government should consider censoring, according to Sunstein.
A 1998 CBS poll found that just 10 per cent of Americans believed that Oswald acted alone, so apparently the other 90 per cent of Americans could be committing some form of thought crime by thinking otherwise under Sunstein’s definition.
Sunstein also cites the belief that “global warming is a deliberate fraud” as another marginal conspiracy theory to be countered by government action. In reality, the majority of Americans now believe that the man-made explanation of global warming is not true, and that global warming is natural, according to the latest polls.
But Sunstein saves his most ludicrous example until last. On page 5 he characterizes as “false and dangerous” the idea that exposure to sunlight is healthy, despite the fact that top medical experts agree prolonged exposure to sunlight reduces the risk of developing certain cancers.
To claim that encouraging people to get out in the sun is to peddle a dangerous conspiracy theory is like saying that promoting the breathing of fresh air is also a thought crime. One can only presume that Sunstein is deliberately framing the debate by going to such absurd extremes so as to make any belief whatsoever into a conspiracy theory unless it’s specifically approved by the kind of government thought police system he is pushing for.
Despite highlighting the fact that repressive societies go hand in hand with an increase in “conspiracy theories,” Sunstein’s ’solution’ to stamp out such thought crimes is to ban free speech, fulfilling the precise characteristic of the “repressive society” he warns against elsewhere in the paper.
“We could imagine circumstances in which a conspiracy theory became so pervasive, and so dangerous, that censorship would be thinkable,” he writes on page 20. Remember that Sunstein is not just talking about censoring Holocaust denial or anything that’s even debatable in the context of free speech, he’s talking about widely accepted beliefs shared by the majority of Americans but ones viewed as distasteful by the government, which would seek to either marginalize by means of taxation or outright censor such views.
No surprise therefore that Sunstein has called for re-writing the First Amendment as well as advocating Internet censorship and even proposing that Americans should celebrate tax day and be thankful that the state takes a huge chunk of their income.
The government has made it clear that growing suspicion towards authority is a direct threat to their political agenda and indeed Sunstein admits this on page 3 of his paper.
That is why they are now engaging in full on information warfare in an effort to undermine, disrupt and eventually outlaw organized peaceful resistance to their growing tyranny.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Pope B16's Hindu Gesture of Shiva?
POPE BENEDICT XVI'S OCCULT MULTI-FINGERED GESTURE WITH BOTH HANDS JOINED EVOKES HINDU ALL-SEEING EYE OF SHIVA (THE "SUPREME BEING" OF THE HINDUS)
Letter from Troy:
Photo of Benedict XVI Ratzinger (above left) brought to my attention by Doug Willinger of http://continuingcounterreformation.blogspot.com/
Letter from Troy:
Photo of Benedict XVI Ratzinger (above left) brought to my attention by Doug Willinger of http://continuingcounterreformation.blogspot.com/
"The Eye of Shiva" illustration (above right; source unknown, please contact me if known to the reader) was brought to my attention previously by Marco Ponce of http://marcoponce.com/ & is posted at his photo collection at: http://picasaweb.google.com/marcoponce/SymbolsEyeOfSaturnSatan#5421282767178932210
BENEDICT XVI RATZINGER'S HAND GESTURE ALSO EVOKES THIS HINDU DEITY THAT IS EITHER SHIVA OR VISHNU.
At the site that I found the photo below, the photos is labelled "Sudarsana" (also spelled in English "Sudarshana") which is apparently a weapon of a type known as a "chakra") that Shiva gave to Vishnu, according to Hindu mythology.
Internet researcher of the occult Jon X Revelator in his interesting Saturnalian study (attached here as a PDF) incorrectly labels the photo below as being a deity called Sudarsana. This is false, but presumably he found the photo below merely labelled with that word & no other info at the link that I give below. On another photo JXR labels Shiva as being a "goddess". This is false. Known to the Hindus as "Lord" Shiva, he is in fact male & is considered the supreme being in their scheme of things.
JXR interprets both solar haloes & ourobouroses (depictions of a snake in a circular formation swallowing its own tail) behind the heads of different eastern deities as representing Saturn & thus identifies them all as being one & the same. It is unclear to me whether or not in the Hindu pantheon this is considered to be so in the case of Shiva & Saturn.
In a quote that I post below it shows that "Lord" Shiva is the lord of Saturn. So the quote that JXR uses using those very words "Lord Shiva is the lord of Saturn"does not show that Shiva is Saturn. Nor does this quote that JXR apparently misreads, in which Kenneth Grant clearly implies that Shiva is Shaitan or Set (Satan) & states that Saturn is the servant of Shaitan/Sat:
"Saturn: The planetary representative of Shaitan or Set" - Aleister Crowley and the hidden god by Kenneth Grant, p. 225
However two other quotes - one from an apparently Hindu source & another by Theosophical Society founder Blavatsky - that JXR uses contend (confusingly) that they are the one & the same (rather than Saturn being a servant of Shiva):
"Lord Shiva, the ruler of the planets, is Saturn in one of his manifestations." - The Thousand Names of Shiva by Sterling Publishers Pvt., Limited,, Vijaya Kumar, p. 123
"Kiyun, or the god Kivan, worshipped by the Hebrews in the wilderness, is Shiva, the Hindu Saturn."
- Occultism of the Secret Doctrine by H.P. Blavatsky, p. 235
- TS (Much more info & a number of images posted below, please check it out!)
http://realityresearch.wordpress.com/
reality research resource
exposing the roman world order – the papal roman empire's covert global power structure & mystery babylon new world order agenda
SHIVA & SATURN:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080225212045/http://www.shreevedic.com/saturn.asp
Saturn tops the list of Surya’s nine sons in fierceness. The dark complexioned Yamuna is Saturn’s sister and Yama, the controller of death is his younger brother. Saturn’s harshness is also caused by his strange family.
According to ancient myths Surya, the Sun God, allocated a separate ‘loka’ to each of his progeny on attaining maturity.
But Saturn, who was by nature evil and greedy, was not satisfied with reigning over only one Loka. He made a plan to invade all the other Lokas.
Surya was extremely pained by this maldesign of Saturn. But his sane counsel had no effect on Saturn’s evil intention. Eventually Surya appealed to Lord Shiva. Ever ready to deliver his devotee from fear Lord Shiva appeared and warned the impudent Saturn. When Saturn ignored him a battle ensued between the two. Saturn vanquished all the Ganas of Lord Shiva along with Nandy and Veerbhadra with his amazing valour. On seeing the destruction of his army Shiva was outraged and he opened his third eye. Saturn also targeted him with his eye’s deadly vision. The whole of Saturn ‘Loka’ was engulfed in an unparalleled light born of the two might sights. An enraged Shiva then struck Saturn with his trident. Saturn could not withstand its blow and fell unconscious. Seeing his son in this state, Surya was overcome with grief. He prayed Shiva to spare Shani’s life. Easy to please Shiva eliminated all the troubles of Saturn. After this Saturn accepted Shiva’s omnipotence and sought forgiveness from him. Impressed by the fighting skill of valiant Saturn Lord Shiva admitted him in his service and appointed him the executor of punishment.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva for more details on Shiva.
Note: Many very interesting photos related to the hexagram at the link below:
http://www.gosai.com/krishna-talk/84-star-david-satkona.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudarshana_Chakra
"Shiva gives Vishnu the chakra"
EXCERPTED FOOTNOTES SHOWING THAT THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY'S ALICE BAILEY CONSIDERED THE ALL-SEEING EYE TO BE THE EYE OF SHIVA FROM:
The All-Seeing Eye, The President, The Secretary and The Guru
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/All_Seeing_Eye.htm
“...the phrase so often employed, `the All-Seeing Eye.' This refers to the planetary Logos to see all parts, aspects and phases (in time and space) of his planetary vehicle,...”
- Alice Bailey, Discipleship in the New Age II - Teachings on the New Age - Part IV
Bailey's "planetary Logos" is a satanic trinity, the scheme is as follows,
Shamballa: Ruler - Sanat (Satan) Kumara
Hierarchy: Ruler - The [Anti] Christ
Humanity: Ruler - Lucifer
“One of the four Lipka Lords, Who stand nearest to our planetary Logos, is called 'The Living Serpent,' and His emblem is a serpent of blue with one eye, the form of a ruby, in its head. Students who care to carry this symbology a little further can connect this idea with the 'eye of Shiva' which sees and knows all...”
- Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul - A Treatise of Cosmic Fire
“The eye of Shiva – the All-Seeing Eye, the eye which directs the will and purposes of Deity.”
- Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul - Esoteric Astrology - III - Triangles of Energy - Constellations
The Occult Meaning of the All-Seeing Eye
Lieutenant C. A. L. Totten, to Secretary of Treasury Charles J. Folger, on February 10, 1882:
“The All-Seeing Eye is one of the oldest hieroglyphics of the Deity. The triangle also is a cabalistic symbol of the most remote antiquity...
The descent of the mystic eye and triangle in the form of a capstone to this mysterious monument [the Great Pyramid of Gizeh] of all times and nations, is to us as a people most pregnant with significance. The motto, Novus Ordo Seclorum, is a quotation from the 4th Ecologue and was borrowed in turn by Virgil from the mystic Sylbylline records.
The entire quotation is as follows: ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum altered from Magnus Soeclorum Ordo, a mighty order of the ages born anew. Both the prophetic Virgin and Saturnian kingdoms now return. Now a new progeny is let down from the heavens. Favor, chaste Lucina, the boy soon to be born in whom the iron age shall come to an end, and the golden one shall arise again in the whole earth.’”
Chapter 14: Great Cycle, Global Grid And Multidimensional Physics: The Historical Perspective
Papal Hierarchical Structure
from Troy:
PAPAL ROMAN EMPIRE: ORDER OF PRECEDENCE & INFLUENCE OF THE KEY KNIGHTHOOD ORDERS (BOTH OVERT & COVERT) - EXPANDED & REVISED [V.1]
Reality Research Resource
http://realityresearch.wordpress.com
PAPAL ROMAN EMPIRE HEADS:
* The Jesuit Order (founded in 1534 by Ignatius of Loyola)
Superior-General ("Black Pope"): Adolfo Nicolás
* Pope ("White Pope"; "Papal Caesar"; "Pontifex Maximus"; Supreme Pontiff of the [so-called] Universal Church; Bishop of Rome): Joseph "Benedict XVI" Ratzinger
SUGGESTED ORDER OF PRECEDENCE & INFLUENCE OF THE KEY KNIGHTHOOD ORDERS (BOTH OVERT & COVERT) WITHIN THE PAPAL ROMAN EMPIRE:
1: The Order of the Golden Fleece (Spanish branch) (f. 1430 by Duke Phillip III of Burgundy, Spanish/Austrian split: 1712). "Sovereign": "Prince of the Papal Roman Empire" Juan Carlos I, King of Spain [Head of the House of Bourbon; also Grand Master of eight other orders; "Stranger" Knight of the Order of the Garter; Knight of the Hispano-Neapolitan Order of St Januarius; Knight Grand Cross of the Hispano-Neapolitan Constantinian Order; Knight of the Collar of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre; Knight of the Order of the Most Holy Annunciation).
2: The Order of the Garter (f. 1344 by Edward III, King of England). "Sovereign": "Princess of the Papal Roman Empire" Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom [also "Sovereign" of the Orders of St John, the Thistle, Bath, Saints Michael & George, Royal Victorian Order, etc...; Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Netherlands Lion; Knight with Chain of the Royal Order of the Seraphim (Sweden)]; Chancellor: Lord Carrington (Peter Carington, 6th Baron Carrington) [also Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter; Knight Grand Cross of the Orders of Saints Michael & George).
NOTE: Key knights & dames within both the Order of the Golden Fleece (Spanish branch - the far more elite of the two branches) & the Order of the Golden Fleece are: Juan Carlos I, Elizabeth II (English OSJ head), Beatrix, Queen of the Netherlands (Dutch OSJ head) & Carl XVI Gustav, King of Sweden (Swedish OSJ head).
3: The Order of the Holy Sepulchre (and its associated Order of Merit for non-Catholics) (f. 1103 by Godfrey of Bouillon, first Latin King of Jerusalem, who was also the first head of this Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre). Grand Master: "Papal Prince" John Cardinal Foley [also Commander Grand Cross of the Order of the Polar Star (Sweden)].
4: The Order of St Januarius (Both branches) (f. 1738 by Charles, King of Naples & Sicily [Charles VII, King of Naples/Charles V, King of Sicily] later became Charles III, King of Spain; Hispano-Neapolitan/Franco-Neapolitan split 1960).
* Hispano-Neapolitan Grand Master: Don Infante Carlos, Duke of Calabria [also Grand Master of the Hispano-Neapolitan Constantinian Order; Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece (Spanish branch); Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre].
* Franco-Neapolitan Grand Master: Prince Carlo, the Duke of Castro [also Grand Master of the Franco-Neapolitan Constantinian Order & of the Royal Order of Francis I; Bailiff Grand Cross of Honour & Devotion of the Order of Malta; Knight Grand Cross of Saints Maurice & Lazarus].
NOTE: The Dukes of Calabria & Castro are the disputing Heads of the House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies.
5: The Constantinian Order (Both branches) (f. 16th Century by the "Angeli Comneni" Grand Masters, confirmed in a series of Papal briefs & a Bull of Pope Clement VIII (Ippolito Aldobrandini); transferred to Francesco Farnese 1698).
* Hispano-Neapolitan Grand Master: Don Infante Carlos, Duke of Calabria [also Grand Master of the Hispano-Neapolitan Order of St Januarius; Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece (Spanish branch); Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre].
* Franco-Neapolitan Grand Master: Prince Carlo, the Duke of Castro [also Grand Master of the Franco-Neapolitan Order of St Januarius & of the Royal Order of Francis I; Bailiff Grand Cross of Honour & Devotion of the Order of Malta; Knight Grand Cross of Saints Maurice & Lazarus].
6: The Order of Malta (and its associated Order of Merit for non-Catholics) (f. c. 1099 as the Hospitaller Order by Gerard Thom). Grand Master: "Papal Prince" Matthew Cardinal Festing [also Knight Grand Cross of Justice of the Franco-Neapolitan Constantinian Order; Officer of the Order of the British Empire].
7: Alliance of the Orders of St John of Jersualem
* English branch: (f. 1831; London-based) "Sovereign" Head: Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom [Head of the House of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha a.k.a. Windsor; "Sovereign" of the Orders of the Garter, Thistle, Bath, Saints Michael & George, Royal Victorian Order, etc...; Dame of the Order of the Golden Fleece (Spanish branch)]; Grand Prior, Prince Richard, the Duke of Gloucester [also House of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha a.k.a. Windsor; Knight of the Garter; Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order; Royal Order of the Polar Star (Sweden)].
* Dutch branch (Johanniter Orde): (became independent of the German branch in 1946, after World War II; Hague-based) Honorary Commander: Beatrix, Queen of the Netherlands [Head of the House of Orange-Nassau; "Sovereign" of both the Order of the Netherlands Lion & the Order of the House of Orange; Dame of the Order of the Golden Fleece (Spanish branch); "Stranger" Dame of the Order of the Garter].
* Swedish branch (Johanniterorden): (became independent of the German branch in 1946, after World War II; Stockholm-based) High Protector: Carl XVI Gustav, King of Sweden [Head of the House of Bernadotte; Lord & Master (Grand Master) of the Royal Orders of the Seraphim & Polar Star [also Knight of the former & Commander Grand Cross of the latter); Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece (Spanish branch); "Stranger" Knight of the Order of the Garter; Knight Grand Cross of both the Order of the Netherlands Lion & the Order of the House of Orange].
* German branch (Johanniterorden [Bailiwick of Brandenburg - also includes Swiss, French, Hungarian & Finnish Commanderies]): (f. 1160; Berlin-based) Master: Oskar, Prince of Prussia [House of Hohenzollern - although not the Head of that House, which is Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia].
8: The Order of the Golden Fleece (Austrian branch) (f. 1430 by Duke Phillip III of Burgundy, Spanish/Austrian split: 1712). Grand Master: Karl Habsburg-Lothringen, Archduke & Prince (Austria), Prince (Hungary) [Head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine].
9: Order of Saints Maurice & Lazarus (f. 1572 by Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy).
Grand Master: Vittorio Emanuele, Prince of Naples, Duke of Savoy [also Grand Master of the more elite Order of the Most Holy Annunciation (Juan Carlos I of Spain is the other most notable known member) & of the Royal House of Savoy's Order of Merit; Bailiff Grand Cross of Justice of Franco-Neapolitan Constantinian Order; Bailiff Grand Cross of Order of Malta].
10: The Teutonic Order (f. c. 1190 by Duke Friedrich of Hohenstaufen).
Grand Master/General Abbot: Bruno Platter.
- TS
Reality Research Resource
http://realityresearch.wordpress.com
NOTES ON THE SUGGESTED ORDER OF PRECEDENCE IN THE ABOVE LIST:
I use several criteria for my ongoing assessment of which order takes precedence: any official info, the leadership & membership, how senior a position one knighthood order's GM is as a member of other orders in relation to other knighthood GM's, historical info & how that might tie into the current scene, the list goes on, but these are all good criteria. Also worth noting the differences between the two branches of the Golden Fleece & Constantinians (& the latter's more elite St Januarius Order). Number of key shared members especially Royal members (esp. notable in the Fleece, Garter & Hispano-Neapolitan CO) & the global networking potential (absolutely vast in the case of the Franco-Neapolitan Constantinian Order.
It seems that none of these Papal-loyal Orders, including the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre have claimed precedence over the Golden Fleece:
http://www.chivalricorders.org/vatican/holysep.htm
Numerous historic privileges have been claimed for knights of the Holy Sepulcher; the right to the title of Count Palatine (in any case abrogated by the nineteenth century reforms of the Roman nobility), precedence before the members of all other Orders except that of the Golden Fleece, the right to legitimize bastards, change baptismal names, grant arms, create notaries and hold religious benefices while married (similar extravagant privileges were granted at various times to the members of the Constantinian Order and several other Orders but all have been effectively abrogated and are unrecognized today). Such privileges were certainly never recognized as being the prerogatives of the knights appointed by the two French institutions, and there is little evidence that any European ruler recognized these privileges even for those dubbed at the Tomb of Our Lord.
Guy Sainty confirms in one of his online studies on the Equestrians that both Juan Carlos (Grand Master of the Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece) & his cousin Infante Carlos, Duke of Calabria (Grand Master of the Hispano-Neaplitan Constantinian Order & its more elite sister order, the Order of St Januarius are both Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. Juan Carlos has the highest grade of the Equestrians: Knight of the Collar. They are of course knights of each others orders.
http://www.chivalricorders.org/vatican/holysep.htm
Today the two Spanish Lieutenancies alone in the Order have maintained a "noble" character, requiring proof of paternal nobility for all its members. King Juan Carlos of Spain has been awarded the Collar of the Order, as was his late father, the Count of Barcelona, and both the Prince of the Asturias and the next senior male of the Royal House of Spain, the Infant Carlos of Bourbon-Sicily, Duke of Calabria have received the Grand Cross.
I contend that only the high Jesuits (including UK Provincial Michael Holman), the Pope & King Juan Carlos I are above Elizabeth II - the Cardinals are her equal. Note that these Papal Princes include Festing - but the ruling European & British Royal heads are also Princes & Princesses of the Papal Roman Empire (which I refuse to honour as "Holy" & encourage others to do likewise).
As the Garter & the Fleece are essentially Templar offshoots (or derivatives at least) & the most powerful of the Templar derived bodies is the Jesuit Order, her loyalty his to the Jesuit Superior-General & any Pope that he directs. She will of course pay respect to the Roman Cardinals & the likes of the Archbishop of Westminster as representatives of the Pope & these women-haters no doubt do not feel inclined to acknowledge her as an equal, but I see her as answering to the Jesuits. How many bosses can one have anyway? Makes for a very messy chain of command.
Note that Juan Carlos I, King of Spain is the current Latin King of Jerusalem & we read the claim here that the first King of Jerusalem founded & was the Head of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre:
http://www.governo.it/Presidenza/cerimoniale/onorificenze_araldica/documentazione/n_ordini_cavallereschi_santa_sede_eng.pdf
The Equestrian Order of The Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem 1) The Origins
The origins of this Order began with the liberation of the land of The Holy Sepulchre from Muslim domination by Godfrey of Bouillon, Chief Commander of the Militia of the first Crusade. In doing so, Godfrey of Bouillon founded the Order of the Holy Sepulchre.
In 1103, as reported by the writers of the Crusade, Balduino I, the first King of Jerusalem and as Head of The Equestrian Order of The Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, he had the power to nominate new Knights. This power was for himself and his successors.
Interesting notes on the seldom discussed Order of St Januarius:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Saint_Januarius
Its statutes and foundation both date to 3 July 1738 and the first promotions to the Order were announced three days later. These statutes limited membership of the Order to sixty Roman Catholic noblemen, although non-Catholics have been admitted by successive Grand Masters in exceptional cases and the total complement of the Order has exceeded sixty on several occasions. As an Order of the collar and the highest Order of the Kingdom, it was intended to equal in rank that of the Golden Fleece, awarded by Charles' father in Spain, and that of the Holy Spirit, given by his cousin in France. Indeed, it was frequent practice for the princes of each branch of the House to receive all three Orders. As they had discussed in their correspondence, King Charles reserved for his father the right to appoint up to six knights, emphasising the unity of the House of Bourbon. ...
The order continues to be awarded today by the two claimaints for the headship of the royal House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, Infante Don Carlos, Duke of Calabria and Prince Carlo, Duke of Castro. Since 1960, the order has been awarded sparingly and total membership has not exceeded eighty, most of the knights being members of royal houses, senior officers of the Constantinian Order or Italian Grandees. The Infante Don Carlos, Duke of Calabria, and his late father both followed the example of the nineteenth century sovereigns of the Two Sicilies in awarding the order not only to the heads of other royal houses (or reigning sovereigns), but also to their closest advisers, several of whom also hold high office in the Constantinian Order.
Neither Constantinian Order Grand Master (the Duke of Calabria & the Duke of Castro, both disputing heads of Bourbon Two Sicilies; also the Grand Masters of the two Orders of St Januarius) are nominally Papal Princes - at least nowhere that I've read, but who knows? They could be, as it is a religious-military lay order like the SMOM (these being the only two).
The Franco-Neapolitan CO has the most Vatican archbishops & cardinals (62 in 2008) as nominal members at least. Hispano-Neapolitan CO Knight (as well as being a Knight of many others, incl SMOM, OSJ, etc) Guy Sainty states that many of these have just receieved the documents & that's that.
Here's my analysis of the RC archbishops, cardinals & SMOM members, based on the lists at the F-N CO site(s). Bear in mind that I posted this in October 2008 so certain details will have changed (Egan's & Murphy-O'Connor's CV's for example):
http://realityresearch.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/franco-neapolitan-constantinian-order-royal-order-of-francis-i-members/
SELECTED PROMINENT S.M.O.M. MEMBERS:
http://www.constantinian.com/dynastic-constantinian.html#maltaorder
“Since 1878, every Prince and Grand Master of the Order of Malta has been a senior member of the Constantinian Order … Many senior officers of the Order of Malta across the world are members of the Constantinian Order and some hold official positions within the Grand Magistry of the Constantinian Order”.
* Matthew Festing (F-N CO Knight Grand Cross of Justice; First invested as a Knight of Justice in 1991; 79th Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta [Knights of Malta]).
* Fredrik Crichton-Stuart (F-N CO Knight Commander of Justice; SMOM’s Grand Prior of England).
* Princess Michael of Kent (Dame Grand Cross of Justice, F-N CO British and Irish Delegation; SMOM Dame; wife of Prince Michael of Kent, the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Mark Master Masons).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SELECTED PROMINENT ROMAN CATHOLIC CARDINALS:
http://www.constantinian.com/dynastic-constantinian.html#apostolic
“Currently over 60 [62 to be precise - as of June 2008] cardinals and archbishops are members of the Constantinian Order and who play a very active role in the spiritual development of the Order. His Holiness The Pope is also represented in the Order through the appointment of a personal Ecclesiastical Counsellor.”
* Albert Cardinal Vanhoye (French Jesuit Cardinal; the F-N CO’s Grand Prior).
* Edward Cardinal Egan (Archbishop of New York [2000-present]; elevated to theCollege of Cardinals [Jan. 2001]; received SMOM’s Bailiff Grand Cross of Honour & Devotion immediately after; SMOM’s US Association’s Principal Chaplain; originally a SMOM Conventual Chaplain ad honorem from 1989; Association of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre’s Grand Prior; Knight of the Grand Cross (Motu Proprio) of the House of Savoy’s Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus).
* Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor (Archbishop of Westminster; F-N CO‘s UK & Irish Delegation’s Prior).
* Desmond Cardinal Connell (Archbishop Emeritus of Dublin & Primate of Ireland; former philosophy lecturer).
* + 9 other Roman Catholic Church Cardinal Archbishops; 1 other Cardinal Archbishop Emeritus; 17 other Cardinals & 31 Diocesan & Titular Archbishops.
PAPAL ROMAN EMPIRE: ORDER OF PRECEDENCE & INFLUENCE OF THE KEY KNIGHTHOOD ORDERS (BOTH OVERT & COVERT) - EXPANDED & REVISED [V.1]
Reality Research Resource
http://realityresearch.wordpress.com
PAPAL ROMAN EMPIRE HEADS:
* The Jesuit Order (founded in 1534 by Ignatius of Loyola)
Superior-General ("Black Pope"): Adolfo Nicolás
* Pope ("White Pope"; "Papal Caesar"; "Pontifex Maximus"; Supreme Pontiff of the [so-called] Universal Church; Bishop of Rome): Joseph "Benedict XVI" Ratzinger
SUGGESTED ORDER OF PRECEDENCE & INFLUENCE OF THE KEY KNIGHTHOOD ORDERS (BOTH OVERT & COVERT) WITHIN THE PAPAL ROMAN EMPIRE:
1: The Order of the Golden Fleece (Spanish branch) (f. 1430 by Duke Phillip III of Burgundy, Spanish/Austrian split: 1712). "Sovereign": "Prince of the Papal Roman Empire" Juan Carlos I, King of Spain [Head of the House of Bourbon; also Grand Master of eight other orders; "Stranger" Knight of the Order of the Garter; Knight of the Hispano-Neapolitan Order of St Januarius; Knight Grand Cross of the Hispano-Neapolitan Constantinian Order; Knight of the Collar of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre; Knight of the Order of the Most Holy Annunciation).
2: The Order of the Garter (f. 1344 by Edward III, King of England). "Sovereign": "Princess of the Papal Roman Empire" Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom [also "Sovereign" of the Orders of St John, the Thistle, Bath, Saints Michael & George, Royal Victorian Order, etc...; Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Netherlands Lion; Knight with Chain of the Royal Order of the Seraphim (Sweden)]; Chancellor: Lord Carrington (Peter Carington, 6th Baron Carrington) [also Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter; Knight Grand Cross of the Orders of Saints Michael & George).
NOTE: Key knights & dames within both the Order of the Golden Fleece (Spanish branch - the far more elite of the two branches) & the Order of the Golden Fleece are: Juan Carlos I, Elizabeth II (English OSJ head), Beatrix, Queen of the Netherlands (Dutch OSJ head) & Carl XVI Gustav, King of Sweden (Swedish OSJ head).
3: The Order of the Holy Sepulchre (and its associated Order of Merit for non-Catholics) (f. 1103 by Godfrey of Bouillon, first Latin King of Jerusalem, who was also the first head of this Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre). Grand Master: "Papal Prince" John Cardinal Foley [also Commander Grand Cross of the Order of the Polar Star (Sweden)].
4: The Order of St Januarius (Both branches) (f. 1738 by Charles, King of Naples & Sicily [Charles VII, King of Naples/Charles V, King of Sicily] later became Charles III, King of Spain; Hispano-Neapolitan/Franco-Neapolitan split 1960).
* Hispano-Neapolitan Grand Master: Don Infante Carlos, Duke of Calabria [also Grand Master of the Hispano-Neapolitan Constantinian Order; Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece (Spanish branch); Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre].
* Franco-Neapolitan Grand Master: Prince Carlo, the Duke of Castro [also Grand Master of the Franco-Neapolitan Constantinian Order & of the Royal Order of Francis I; Bailiff Grand Cross of Honour & Devotion of the Order of Malta; Knight Grand Cross of Saints Maurice & Lazarus].
NOTE: The Dukes of Calabria & Castro are the disputing Heads of the House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies.
5: The Constantinian Order (Both branches) (f. 16th Century by the "Angeli Comneni" Grand Masters, confirmed in a series of Papal briefs & a Bull of Pope Clement VIII (Ippolito Aldobrandini); transferred to Francesco Farnese 1698).
* Hispano-Neapolitan Grand Master: Don Infante Carlos, Duke of Calabria [also Grand Master of the Hispano-Neapolitan Order of St Januarius; Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece (Spanish branch); Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre].
* Franco-Neapolitan Grand Master: Prince Carlo, the Duke of Castro [also Grand Master of the Franco-Neapolitan Order of St Januarius & of the Royal Order of Francis I; Bailiff Grand Cross of Honour & Devotion of the Order of Malta; Knight Grand Cross of Saints Maurice & Lazarus].
6: The Order of Malta (and its associated Order of Merit for non-Catholics) (f. c. 1099 as the Hospitaller Order by Gerard Thom). Grand Master: "Papal Prince" Matthew Cardinal Festing [also Knight Grand Cross of Justice of the Franco-Neapolitan Constantinian Order; Officer of the Order of the British Empire].
7: Alliance of the Orders of St John of Jersualem
* English branch: (f. 1831; London-based) "Sovereign" Head: Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom [Head of the House of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha a.k.a. Windsor; "Sovereign" of the Orders of the Garter, Thistle, Bath, Saints Michael & George, Royal Victorian Order, etc...; Dame of the Order of the Golden Fleece (Spanish branch)]; Grand Prior, Prince Richard, the Duke of Gloucester [also House of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha a.k.a. Windsor; Knight of the Garter; Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order; Royal Order of the Polar Star (Sweden)].
* Dutch branch (Johanniter Orde): (became independent of the German branch in 1946, after World War II; Hague-based) Honorary Commander: Beatrix, Queen of the Netherlands [Head of the House of Orange-Nassau; "Sovereign" of both the Order of the Netherlands Lion & the Order of the House of Orange; Dame of the Order of the Golden Fleece (Spanish branch); "Stranger" Dame of the Order of the Garter].
* Swedish branch (Johanniterorden): (became independent of the German branch in 1946, after World War II; Stockholm-based) High Protector: Carl XVI Gustav, King of Sweden [Head of the House of Bernadotte; Lord & Master (Grand Master) of the Royal Orders of the Seraphim & Polar Star [also Knight of the former & Commander Grand Cross of the latter); Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece (Spanish branch); "Stranger" Knight of the Order of the Garter; Knight Grand Cross of both the Order of the Netherlands Lion & the Order of the House of Orange].
* German branch (Johanniterorden [Bailiwick of Brandenburg - also includes Swiss, French, Hungarian & Finnish Commanderies]): (f. 1160; Berlin-based) Master: Oskar, Prince of Prussia [House of Hohenzollern - although not the Head of that House, which is Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia].
8: The Order of the Golden Fleece (Austrian branch) (f. 1430 by Duke Phillip III of Burgundy, Spanish/Austrian split: 1712). Grand Master: Karl Habsburg-Lothringen, Archduke & Prince (Austria), Prince (Hungary) [Head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine].
9: Order of Saints Maurice & Lazarus (f. 1572 by Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy).
Grand Master: Vittorio Emanuele, Prince of Naples, Duke of Savoy [also Grand Master of the more elite Order of the Most Holy Annunciation (Juan Carlos I of Spain is the other most notable known member) & of the Royal House of Savoy's Order of Merit; Bailiff Grand Cross of Justice of Franco-Neapolitan Constantinian Order; Bailiff Grand Cross of Order of Malta].
10: The Teutonic Order (f. c. 1190 by Duke Friedrich of Hohenstaufen).
Grand Master/General Abbot: Bruno Platter.
- TS
Reality Research Resource
http://realityresearch.wordpress.com
NOTES ON THE SUGGESTED ORDER OF PRECEDENCE IN THE ABOVE LIST:
I use several criteria for my ongoing assessment of which order takes precedence: any official info, the leadership & membership, how senior a position one knighthood order's GM is as a member of other orders in relation to other knighthood GM's, historical info & how that might tie into the current scene, the list goes on, but these are all good criteria. Also worth noting the differences between the two branches of the Golden Fleece & Constantinians (& the latter's more elite St Januarius Order). Number of key shared members especially Royal members (esp. notable in the Fleece, Garter & Hispano-Neapolitan CO) & the global networking potential (absolutely vast in the case of the Franco-Neapolitan Constantinian Order.
It seems that none of these Papal-loyal Orders, including the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre have claimed precedence over the Golden Fleece:
http://www.chivalricorders.org/vatican/holysep.htm
Numerous historic privileges have been claimed for knights of the Holy Sepulcher; the right to the title of Count Palatine (in any case abrogated by the nineteenth century reforms of the Roman nobility), precedence before the members of all other Orders except that of the Golden Fleece, the right to legitimize bastards, change baptismal names, grant arms, create notaries and hold religious benefices while married (similar extravagant privileges were granted at various times to the members of the Constantinian Order and several other Orders but all have been effectively abrogated and are unrecognized today). Such privileges were certainly never recognized as being the prerogatives of the knights appointed by the two French institutions, and there is little evidence that any European ruler recognized these privileges even for those dubbed at the Tomb of Our Lord.
Guy Sainty confirms in one of his online studies on the Equestrians that both Juan Carlos (Grand Master of the Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece) & his cousin Infante Carlos, Duke of Calabria (Grand Master of the Hispano-Neaplitan Constantinian Order & its more elite sister order, the Order of St Januarius are both Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. Juan Carlos has the highest grade of the Equestrians: Knight of the Collar. They are of course knights of each others orders.
http://www.chivalricorders.org/vatican/holysep.htm
Today the two Spanish Lieutenancies alone in the Order have maintained a "noble" character, requiring proof of paternal nobility for all its members. King Juan Carlos of Spain has been awarded the Collar of the Order, as was his late father, the Count of Barcelona, and both the Prince of the Asturias and the next senior male of the Royal House of Spain, the Infant Carlos of Bourbon-Sicily, Duke of Calabria have received the Grand Cross.
I contend that only the high Jesuits (including UK Provincial Michael Holman), the Pope & King Juan Carlos I are above Elizabeth II - the Cardinals are her equal. Note that these Papal Princes include Festing - but the ruling European & British Royal heads are also Princes & Princesses of the Papal Roman Empire (which I refuse to honour as "Holy" & encourage others to do likewise).
As the Garter & the Fleece are essentially Templar offshoots (or derivatives at least) & the most powerful of the Templar derived bodies is the Jesuit Order, her loyalty his to the Jesuit Superior-General & any Pope that he directs. She will of course pay respect to the Roman Cardinals & the likes of the Archbishop of Westminster as representatives of the Pope & these women-haters no doubt do not feel inclined to acknowledge her as an equal, but I see her as answering to the Jesuits. How many bosses can one have anyway? Makes for a very messy chain of command.
Note that Juan Carlos I, King of Spain is the current Latin King of Jerusalem & we read the claim here that the first King of Jerusalem founded & was the Head of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre:
http://www.governo.it/Presidenza/cerimoniale/onorificenze_araldica/documentazione/n_ordini_cavallereschi_santa_sede_eng.pdf
The Equestrian Order of The Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem 1) The Origins
The origins of this Order began with the liberation of the land of The Holy Sepulchre from Muslim domination by Godfrey of Bouillon, Chief Commander of the Militia of the first Crusade. In doing so, Godfrey of Bouillon founded the Order of the Holy Sepulchre.
In 1103, as reported by the writers of the Crusade, Balduino I, the first King of Jerusalem and as Head of The Equestrian Order of The Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, he had the power to nominate new Knights. This power was for himself and his successors.
Interesting notes on the seldom discussed Order of St Januarius:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Saint_Januarius
Its statutes and foundation both date to 3 July 1738 and the first promotions to the Order were announced three days later. These statutes limited membership of the Order to sixty Roman Catholic noblemen, although non-Catholics have been admitted by successive Grand Masters in exceptional cases and the total complement of the Order has exceeded sixty on several occasions. As an Order of the collar and the highest Order of the Kingdom, it was intended to equal in rank that of the Golden Fleece, awarded by Charles' father in Spain, and that of the Holy Spirit, given by his cousin in France. Indeed, it was frequent practice for the princes of each branch of the House to receive all three Orders. As they had discussed in their correspondence, King Charles reserved for his father the right to appoint up to six knights, emphasising the unity of the House of Bourbon. ...
The order continues to be awarded today by the two claimaints for the headship of the royal House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, Infante Don Carlos, Duke of Calabria and Prince Carlo, Duke of Castro. Since 1960, the order has been awarded sparingly and total membership has not exceeded eighty, most of the knights being members of royal houses, senior officers of the Constantinian Order or Italian Grandees. The Infante Don Carlos, Duke of Calabria, and his late father both followed the example of the nineteenth century sovereigns of the Two Sicilies in awarding the order not only to the heads of other royal houses (or reigning sovereigns), but also to their closest advisers, several of whom also hold high office in the Constantinian Order.
Neither Constantinian Order Grand Master (the Duke of Calabria & the Duke of Castro, both disputing heads of Bourbon Two Sicilies; also the Grand Masters of the two Orders of St Januarius) are nominally Papal Princes - at least nowhere that I've read, but who knows? They could be, as it is a religious-military lay order like the SMOM (these being the only two).
The Franco-Neapolitan CO has the most Vatican archbishops & cardinals (62 in 2008) as nominal members at least. Hispano-Neapolitan CO Knight (as well as being a Knight of many others, incl SMOM, OSJ, etc) Guy Sainty states that many of these have just receieved the documents & that's that.
Here's my analysis of the RC archbishops, cardinals & SMOM members, based on the lists at the F-N CO site(s). Bear in mind that I posted this in October 2008 so certain details will have changed (Egan's & Murphy-O'Connor's CV's for example):
http://realityresearch.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/franco-neapolitan-constantinian-order-royal-order-of-francis-i-members/
SELECTED PROMINENT S.M.O.M. MEMBERS:
http://www.constantinian.com/dynastic-constantinian.html#maltaorder
“Since 1878, every Prince and Grand Master of the Order of Malta has been a senior member of the Constantinian Order … Many senior officers of the Order of Malta across the world are members of the Constantinian Order and some hold official positions within the Grand Magistry of the Constantinian Order”.
* Matthew Festing (F-N CO Knight Grand Cross of Justice; First invested as a Knight of Justice in 1991; 79th Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta [Knights of Malta]).
* Fredrik Crichton-Stuart (F-N CO Knight Commander of Justice; SMOM’s Grand Prior of England).
* Princess Michael of Kent (Dame Grand Cross of Justice, F-N CO British and Irish Delegation; SMOM Dame; wife of Prince Michael of Kent, the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Mark Master Masons).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SELECTED PROMINENT ROMAN CATHOLIC CARDINALS:
http://www.constantinian.com/dynastic-constantinian.html#apostolic
“Currently over 60 [62 to be precise - as of June 2008] cardinals and archbishops are members of the Constantinian Order and who play a very active role in the spiritual development of the Order. His Holiness The Pope is also represented in the Order through the appointment of a personal Ecclesiastical Counsellor.”
* Albert Cardinal Vanhoye (French Jesuit Cardinal; the F-N CO’s Grand Prior).
* Edward Cardinal Egan (Archbishop of New York [2000-present]; elevated to theCollege of Cardinals [Jan. 2001]; received SMOM’s Bailiff Grand Cross of Honour & Devotion immediately after; SMOM’s US Association’s Principal Chaplain; originally a SMOM Conventual Chaplain ad honorem from 1989; Association of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre’s Grand Prior; Knight of the Grand Cross (Motu Proprio) of the House of Savoy’s Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus).
* Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor (Archbishop of Westminster; F-N CO‘s UK & Irish Delegation’s Prior).
* Desmond Cardinal Connell (Archbishop Emeritus of Dublin & Primate of Ireland; former philosophy lecturer).
* + 9 other Roman Catholic Church Cardinal Archbishops; 1 other Cardinal Archbishop Emeritus; 17 other Cardinals & 31 Diocesan & Titular Archbishops.
Monday, June 28, 2010
No German Suicide Bombers over Danzig, East Prussia, etc.
Nor any mention about the infamous 1995 'Operation Storm' forced expulsion of some 300,000 Serbs from their ancestral homes in Krijina from this article from the publication founded by SMOM William F. Buckley
From the National Review
From the National Review
http://article.nationalreview.com/436085/helen-thomas-turkey-and-the-liberation-of-israel/victor-davis-hanson
excerpt:
Anti-Semitism as displayed by both [Hearst reporter, Helen] Thomas and Turkey’s leaders is not predicated on criticizing Israel, much less disagreeing with its foreign policy. Instead, it hinges upon focusing singularly on Israeli behavior, and applying a standard to it that is never extended to any other nation.
There are plenty of disputes over borders and land in the world. But to Helen Thomas or the Turkish government, Kashmir or the Russian-Chinese border matters little — although the chances of escalation to nuclear confrontation are far greater there than on the West Bank. Has Thomas ever popped off, “Why don’t those Chinese just get the hell out of Tibet?” or “Why don’t those Indians just get out of Kashmir?”
The Palestinian “refugees” — a majority of whom are the children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren of people actually displaced in 1948 — compose a small part of the world’s refugee population. There are millions of refugees in Rwanda, the Congo, and Darfur. Well over a half-million Jews were ethnically cleansed from the major Arab capitals between 1947 and 1973, each wave of expulsion cresting after a particular Mideast war. Again, few care to demonstrate for the plight of any of these people. Prime Minister Erdogan has not led any global effort to relocate the starving millions in Darfur, despite his loud concern for “refugees” in Gaza. The United States gives far more millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians than does their Muslim protector in Turkey, who saves cash in winning Palestinian support by practicing anti-Semitism on the cheap. Nor have I heard of any German suicide bomber blowing himself up over lost ancestral land in Danzig or East Prussia, although that land was lost about the same time as some Palestinians left Israel. Few worry that in 1949 tens of thousands of Japanese were forcibly expelled by the Soviet Union from Sakhalin Island.
The world likewise cares little for the concept of “occupation” in the abstract; it is only the concrete example of Palestine that earns its opprobrium. We can be assured that President Obama will not bring up Ossetia with President Putin. He will not raise the question of Tibet with the Chinese or occupied Cyprus with Prime Minister Erdogan. Will Helen Thomas ever ask, “How can Turkey be allowed to keep Nicosia a divided city?” Will she worry whether Greeks are allowed to buy property in the Turkish sector of that capital?
There is no European outcry over the slaughter of South Koreans in a torpedo attack by a North Korean vessel. I don’t recall President Sarkozy weighing in on that particular moral issue. The United Nations is angrier at Israel for enforcing a blockade against its terrorist neighbor than it is at Somalia for allowing pirates to kill and rob right off its coast. There was not much of a global outcry when Iran hijacked a British naval vessel; few in Turkey demonstrated when the French blew up a Greenpeace protest vessel.
“Disproportionate” is a term used to condemn Israeli retaliation. It does not apply to other, far more violent reprisals, such as the Russian leveling of Grozny, or the Turkish killing of Kurds, or occasional Hindu mass rioting and murdering of Muslims in India. Does Prime Minister Erdogan wish to allow “peace activists” to interview Kurds detained in his prisons, or to adjudicate the status of Kurds, Armenians, or Christian religious figures who live in Turkey? Can we imagine a peace flotilla of Swedish and British leftists sailing to Cyprus to “liberate” Greek land or investigate the “disappearance” of thousands of Greeks in 1974? And if they did, what would happen to them? About the same as would happen if they blocked a road to interdict a Turkish armored column rolling into Kurdistan.
Nor do human-rights violations mean much any more. Iran executes more of its own citizens each year than Israel has killed Palestinians in the course of war in any given year. Syria murders whomever it pleases in Lebanon without worry that any international body will ever condemn its action. I have heard a great deal about the “massacre” or “slaughter” at Jenin, where 52 Palestinians and 23 Israelis died. Indeed, the 2002 propaganda film Jenin, Jenin was a big hit on college campuses. But I have never seen a documentary Hama, Hama commemorating the real 1982 slaughter of somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians by the criminal Assad regime in Syria, with which we now so eagerly wish to restore ties. I find a 1,000-to-1 fatality rule generally applies: Each person killed by the Israel Defense Forces warrants about as much international attention as 1,000 people killed by Africans, Russians, Indians, Chinese, or Arabs.
I used to think that oil, Arab demography, fear of Islamic terrorism, and blowback from its close association with the United States explained the global double standard that is applied to Israel.
But after the hysteria over the Gaza flotilla, the outbursts of various members of the Turkish government, and Ms. Thomas’s candid revelations, I think the mad-dog hatred of Israel is more or less because it is a Jewish state. Period.
Let me explain. Intellectuals used to loudly condemn anti-Semitism because it was largely associated with those deemed to be less sophisticated people, often right-wing, who on either racial, nationalistic, or religious grounds regarded Jews as undesirable. Hating Jews was a sign of boorish chauvinism, or of the conspiratorial mind that exuded envy and jealousy of the more successful.
But in the last two decades especially, the Left has made anti-Semitism respectable in intellectual circles. The fascistic nature of various Palestinian liberation groups was forgotten, as the “occupied” Palestinians grafted their cause onto that of American blacks, Mexican-Americans, and Asian-Americans. Slurring post-Holocaust Jews was still infra dig, but damning the nation-state of Israel as imperialistic and oppressive was considered principled. No one ever cared to ask: Why Israel and not other, far more egregious examples? In other words, one could now focus inordinately on the Jews by emphasizing that one’s criticism was predicated on cosmic issues of human rights and justice. And by defaming Israel the nation, one could vent one’s dislike of Jews without being stuck with the traditional boorish label of anti-Semite.
So an anti-Semitic bigot like Helen Thomas could navigate perfectly well among the top echelons of Washington society spouting off her hatred of Israel, since her animus was supposedly against Israeli policies rather than those who made them. Only an inadvertent remark finally caught up with her to reveal that what she felt was not anger growing out of a territorial dispute, but furor about the nature of an entire people who should be deported to the sites of the Holocaust.
Finally, as I say, all this may have a strangely liberating effect on Israel. We know now that whatever it does, the world, or at least its prominent political and media figures, is going to damn it. Its longtime patron, the United States, now sees not much difference between Israel’s democratic achievement and the autocracies around it, which we are now either subsidizing or courting. As a result, the global censors have lost leverage with Israel, since they have proven to be such laughable adjudicators of right and wrong when Israel is involved.
Israelis should assume by now that whether they act tentatively or strongly, the negative reaction will be the same. Therefore why not project the image of a strong, unapologetic country to a world that has completely lost its moral bearings, and is more likely to respect Israel’s strength than its past concern for meeting an impossible global standard?
How odd that the more the activists, political leaders, and media figures issue moral strictures against Israel, the more they prove abjectly amoral. And the more they seek to pressure Israel, the more they are liberating it to do what it feels it must.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.
excerpt:
Anti-Semitism as displayed by both [Hearst reporter, Helen] Thomas and Turkey’s leaders is not predicated on criticizing Israel, much less disagreeing with its foreign policy. Instead, it hinges upon focusing singularly on Israeli behavior, and applying a standard to it that is never extended to any other nation.
There are plenty of disputes over borders and land in the world. But to Helen Thomas or the Turkish government, Kashmir or the Russian-Chinese border matters little — although the chances of escalation to nuclear confrontation are far greater there than on the West Bank. Has Thomas ever popped off, “Why don’t those Chinese just get the hell out of Tibet?” or “Why don’t those Indians just get out of Kashmir?”
The Palestinian “refugees” — a majority of whom are the children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren of people actually displaced in 1948 — compose a small part of the world’s refugee population. There are millions of refugees in Rwanda, the Congo, and Darfur. Well over a half-million Jews were ethnically cleansed from the major Arab capitals between 1947 and 1973, each wave of expulsion cresting after a particular Mideast war. Again, few care to demonstrate for the plight of any of these people. Prime Minister Erdogan has not led any global effort to relocate the starving millions in Darfur, despite his loud concern for “refugees” in Gaza. The United States gives far more millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians than does their Muslim protector in Turkey, who saves cash in winning Palestinian support by practicing anti-Semitism on the cheap. Nor have I heard of any German suicide bomber blowing himself up over lost ancestral land in Danzig or East Prussia, although that land was lost about the same time as some Palestinians left Israel. Few worry that in 1949 tens of thousands of Japanese were forcibly expelled by the Soviet Union from Sakhalin Island.
The world likewise cares little for the concept of “occupation” in the abstract; it is only the concrete example of Palestine that earns its opprobrium. We can be assured that President Obama will not bring up Ossetia with President Putin. He will not raise the question of Tibet with the Chinese or occupied Cyprus with Prime Minister Erdogan. Will Helen Thomas ever ask, “How can Turkey be allowed to keep Nicosia a divided city?” Will she worry whether Greeks are allowed to buy property in the Turkish sector of that capital?
There is no European outcry over the slaughter of South Koreans in a torpedo attack by a North Korean vessel. I don’t recall President Sarkozy weighing in on that particular moral issue. The United Nations is angrier at Israel for enforcing a blockade against its terrorist neighbor than it is at Somalia for allowing pirates to kill and rob right off its coast. There was not much of a global outcry when Iran hijacked a British naval vessel; few in Turkey demonstrated when the French blew up a Greenpeace protest vessel.
“Disproportionate” is a term used to condemn Israeli retaliation. It does not apply to other, far more violent reprisals, such as the Russian leveling of Grozny, or the Turkish killing of Kurds, or occasional Hindu mass rioting and murdering of Muslims in India. Does Prime Minister Erdogan wish to allow “peace activists” to interview Kurds detained in his prisons, or to adjudicate the status of Kurds, Armenians, or Christian religious figures who live in Turkey? Can we imagine a peace flotilla of Swedish and British leftists sailing to Cyprus to “liberate” Greek land or investigate the “disappearance” of thousands of Greeks in 1974? And if they did, what would happen to them? About the same as would happen if they blocked a road to interdict a Turkish armored column rolling into Kurdistan.
Nor do human-rights violations mean much any more. Iran executes more of its own citizens each year than Israel has killed Palestinians in the course of war in any given year. Syria murders whomever it pleases in Lebanon without worry that any international body will ever condemn its action. I have heard a great deal about the “massacre” or “slaughter” at Jenin, where 52 Palestinians and 23 Israelis died. Indeed, the 2002 propaganda film Jenin, Jenin was a big hit on college campuses. But I have never seen a documentary Hama, Hama commemorating the real 1982 slaughter of somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians by the criminal Assad regime in Syria, with which we now so eagerly wish to restore ties. I find a 1,000-to-1 fatality rule generally applies: Each person killed by the Israel Defense Forces warrants about as much international attention as 1,000 people killed by Africans, Russians, Indians, Chinese, or Arabs.
I used to think that oil, Arab demography, fear of Islamic terrorism, and blowback from its close association with the United States explained the global double standard that is applied to Israel.
But after the hysteria over the Gaza flotilla, the outbursts of various members of the Turkish government, and Ms. Thomas’s candid revelations, I think the mad-dog hatred of Israel is more or less because it is a Jewish state. Period.
Let me explain. Intellectuals used to loudly condemn anti-Semitism because it was largely associated with those deemed to be less sophisticated people, often right-wing, who on either racial, nationalistic, or religious grounds regarded Jews as undesirable. Hating Jews was a sign of boorish chauvinism, or of the conspiratorial mind that exuded envy and jealousy of the more successful.
But in the last two decades especially, the Left has made anti-Semitism respectable in intellectual circles. The fascistic nature of various Palestinian liberation groups was forgotten, as the “occupied” Palestinians grafted their cause onto that of American blacks, Mexican-Americans, and Asian-Americans. Slurring post-Holocaust Jews was still infra dig, but damning the nation-state of Israel as imperialistic and oppressive was considered principled. No one ever cared to ask: Why Israel and not other, far more egregious examples? In other words, one could now focus inordinately on the Jews by emphasizing that one’s criticism was predicated on cosmic issues of human rights and justice. And by defaming Israel the nation, one could vent one’s dislike of Jews without being stuck with the traditional boorish label of anti-Semite.
So an anti-Semitic bigot like Helen Thomas could navigate perfectly well among the top echelons of Washington society spouting off her hatred of Israel, since her animus was supposedly against Israeli policies rather than those who made them. Only an inadvertent remark finally caught up with her to reveal that what she felt was not anger growing out of a territorial dispute, but furor about the nature of an entire people who should be deported to the sites of the Holocaust.
Finally, as I say, all this may have a strangely liberating effect on Israel. We know now that whatever it does, the world, or at least its prominent political and media figures, is going to damn it. Its longtime patron, the United States, now sees not much difference between Israel’s democratic achievement and the autocracies around it, which we are now either subsidizing or courting. As a result, the global censors have lost leverage with Israel, since they have proven to be such laughable adjudicators of right and wrong when Israel is involved.
Israelis should assume by now that whether they act tentatively or strongly, the negative reaction will be the same. Therefore why not project the image of a strong, unapologetic country to a world that has completely lost its moral bearings, and is more likely to respect Israel’s strength than its past concern for meeting an impossible global standard?
How odd that the more the activists, political leaders, and media figures issue moral strictures against Israel, the more they prove abjectly amoral. And the more they seek to pressure Israel, the more they are liberating it to do what it feels it must.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Canberra 'Back and to the Left'
blatantly masonic architecture hidden in plain sight
Also see- http://continuingcounterreformation.blogspot.com/2010/11/freemasonry-lets-america-down.html
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Letter from Troy Space
MASONIC/ILLUMINIST PYRAMID BUILDINGS & RELATED OCCULT ARCHITECTURE:
Check the design of the street layout near the Australian government HQ in Canberra - does it look like the Illuminati "pyramid without a capstone" symbolism from the US "Great Seal" reverse that also feature son the US $1 bill? For those with eyes to see it does indeed:
Indeed it appears to be an abstracted occultic Baphomet/Goat of Mendez, with horns & lower wing edges discernable, as well as the telltale tri-pronged centre horn & flame given a geometric abstracted representation in the architectural layout. There is even a subtle refelection in the Parliament Building grounds of the lower portions of the snakes forming an elliptical shape with the wand in the middle from that same Baphomet drawing of Eliphas Levi.
And why the apparently functionless Pyramid frame on top of the Australian Parliament building?:
Or the glass Pyramid beneath it?
Also see- http://continuingcounterreformation.blogspot.com/2010/11/freemasonry-lets-america-down.html
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Letter from Troy Space
MASONIC/ILLUMINIST PYRAMID BUILDINGS & RELATED OCCULT ARCHITECTURE:
Check the design of the street layout near the Australian government HQ in Canberra - does it look like the Illuminati "pyramid without a capstone" symbolism from the US "Great Seal" reverse that also feature son the US $1 bill? For those with eyes to see it does indeed:
$1 U.S. bill, back side to the left
Having a closer look at the Australian Parliament Building on "Capital Hill", do we see any occult design at work?:
Indeed it appears to be an abstracted occultic Baphomet/Goat of Mendez, with horns & lower wing edges discernable, as well as the telltale tri-pronged centre horn & flame given a geometric abstracted representation in the architectural layout. There is even a subtle refelection in the Parliament Building grounds of the lower portions of the snakes forming an elliptical shape with the wand in the middle from that same Baphomet drawing of Eliphas Levi.And why the apparently functionless Pyramid frame on top of the Australian Parliament building?:
Or the glass Pyramid beneath it?
I had come across similar shots of Canberra before, but not the ones of the glass pyramid that is underneath the big metal (presumably steel) framed pyramid above the government buildings.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Defining 'Common Sense'
excerpted from
http://thefutureofthings.com/column/1001/dont-burn-the-cat.html
The Elusive “Common Sense”
I hope these two “case studies” managed to demonstrate the magnitude and complexity of what we sometimes call “common sense” and of the knowledge required in order to function well even in the simplest everyday situations.
“Common sense” is notoriously hard to define, but intuitively it implies the knowledge – much of it implicit – that we expect just about all members of society to have. In the information kiosk example, this does not include the detailed knowledge of store and cinema locations, but it does include the knowledge that we want to go to shops only when they are open; that we're willing to accept airports as “nearby” if they're 20 miles away, but cinemas have to be 2 miles away to qualify; etc.
Is there an isolated part of our “common sense” which is all that's required for the information kiosk? No. The knowledge that we can only buy at an open shop is relevant to many aspects of our daily life. The knowledge that we're willing to travel longer distances to reach an airport is actually derived from the fact that there are not many airports situated in urban centers; that there are fewer airports than newsstands; and that the time spent going to the airport is typically a start of a longer trip. We could try to list all of these facts for the sole use of our information kiosk, but it's a large task. It would be much better to share the effort of creating this knowledge with other kinds of software.
This was quite evident back when Hogan was writing The Two Faces of Tomorrow.
In the real world,the best-known attempt to create such a universal set of “common sense” knowledge is the Cyc ( Cyc is a registered trademark of Cycorp) Project. Cyc - (from "encyclopedia", pronounced like psych) - was started in 1984 by Doug Lenat, a prominent artificial intelligence researcher and one of the original Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Cyc has been in continuous development since then, first as a project of Microelectronics and computer Technology Corporation and, since 1994, by Cycorp, Inc. – a company devoted to Cyc and run by Lenat.
Cyc has the ambitious goal of codifying our shared real-world knowledge into a form that can be used by software. Estimates for the number of knowledge items required for this vary, but Cyc usually states several million items would be required. To clarify, these items do not include all that is known to humanity. For example, if there are nearly two million named species of animals known to biologists, and if we associate just a few facts with each, we're way past the “several million” budget. However, the “common sense" underlying this knowledge may be described quite differently and compactly. First, we need to define species, at least using an everyday understanding which does not have to conform to the strictest scientific understanding. What did even early human societies know about species? First, only two animals of the same species can have offspring. Second, the offspring will also be of the same species. Third, members of the same species are typically similar to each other.
[Side note: this coding of information into software-usable context and related contexts has many parallels to the ideas of the “Semantic Web”. Since this is out of the scope of this column, let me just state that these parallels are not a coincidence. However, Cyc’s vision preceded the semantic net, and is much more ambitious, in that it goes beyond understanding what a web page is about, and also aims to use this understanding, together with its common knowledge, in order to derive new conclusions and understandings. In recent years, there has also been some collaboration between Cyc and semantic-network efforts.]
Now, at least a few readers are objecting to the above informal definition of species: What about asexual reproduction and cloning, where you only need one parent? What about mules, which are offspring of parents from different species? What about sexual dimorphism (think of peacocks and peahens, or about the fish species whose males are tiny and permanently attached to the much larger females)? This is where you really need to be careful when defining the knowledge items, and this example should give you some idea of how hard it is to carry out effective “knowledge engineering”. Yet, the real test is not in absolute accuracy: every generalization will have exceptions. The test is in being able to use this common sense to make everyday deductions which are generally dependable, and in being able to capture important exceptions – sometimes in the general pool of “common sense” and sometimes in specific specialized knowledge pools.
These specialized knowledge pools are Cyc's way of going beyond common sense into codification of “expert knowledge”. In the example of knowledge about biological species, it makes sense to have some facts about mammals in the general knowledge pool (e.g. “female mammals lactate to feed their young”; “cows are mammals”), whereas the scientific definition of the class Mammalia mammals and their taxonomic categorization into subclasses, orders etc. would be part of an expert knowledge module. A key part of Cyc design is the interaction between distributed “Cyc agents”. Every Cyc agent is endowed with some specialized knowledge, and communicates with the other agents using a shared “common sense” pool –pretty similar to the structure of human information society.
Now comes the next step: tapping into “shallow” information sources. By “shallow”, I mean sources that have not been codified as hierarchical knowledge. These could be lists and tables of data, such as location and opening times of stores, or geopolitical information. They could also be the Internet itself, using today's search engines with the Cyc knowledge pool guiding the framing of the search question and the interpretation of the web pages that are found. Thus, asking whether two politicians from different states met during 2005 would first trigger a search for their names plus terms such as “meeting”, “summit” etc., as well as the requested date. Web pages that are retrieved by this search are scanned to see whether appropriate sentences indeed appear in them. If there isn’t evidence for such a meeting, Cyc would generate text strings to determine where each politician was during 2005. If it finds a date when both politicians were in the same city, Cyc could use its knowledge regarding the roles and relationships of the politicians to determine whether it is likely that a meeting had been set for that date. Cyc also detects contradictions between different web pages, as well as contradictions between its own knowledge pool and whatever it finds in its searches, so that it can assign “levels of confidence” to the answers it produces.
Once the coding of general knowledge and specialized knowledge has been completed and linked into “flat” information sources, many applications become possible: information kiosks that understand what you're looking for without forcing you to formulize your questions to match the computer's limitations; advice for pet owners that does not blithely suggest harming the pets; dependable home robots; and – possibly the one application at the top of every knowledge
worker's wish list – a human-like search engine.
What's Wrong With Search?
Doug Lenat (Credit: Cycorp
Today's search engines are awesome. They have access to so much information, and sift through it in milliseconds to answer any query we can think of. The problem, of course, is that again we teach ourselves how to query the search engine and how to interpret the results. Some of this involves our admission that some things just can't be found by using a search engine. Last year, Doug Lenat gave a lecture called “Computers versus Common Sense“ at Google, heavily criticizing the state of the art in web search.
Google's Research Blog selected it as one of its “Videos of the Year” picks for 2006. In this lecture, Lenat gave examples of questions that must be broken into several searches – e.g. “is the Eiffel Tower taller than the Space Needle?”, where you must look up each height separately, find the number within the web page that comes up, and compare the numbers. Even tougher for a search engine is the trivial question “what color is a blue car?”.
From a commercial point of view, there may not be much value in a search engine that can answer the two questions above – the first only requires us to spend a minute or two more than we wish, and the second question is too simple to require a computer. Yet, these examples serve to show a much deeper difficulty. Imagine you're doing market research on what colors of cars are preferred by people living in a certain location or matching some demographic criteria.
Wouldn’t you want the search engine to know that “blue car” relates to car color, while “big car” relates to its size, unless it appears as part of the phrase “big car sale” etc.?
So does it all come down to the issue of “Natural Language Understanding” – the effort to get a computer to understand free-form text in English or any other language? Yes and no. Yes – because you can't understand natural language without some common-sense knowledge about the world (compare “John was baking” to “the apple pie was baking”). No – because common-sense knowledge is required for so much else besides the understanding of natural language, as the next example shows.
One commercial application that Cyc identified years ago is the search for photographs. Creators of text used in reporting, marketing or many other applications often need to supplement the text with some appropriate images. But how do you find images that fit the spirit and theme of your text? The best answer today is to attach to each photograph a short description and/or a list of keywords that describe it, which allows standard text search to pull up relevant images. This depends on the skills of the person describing the photograph as well as those of the person searching for photographs. Cyc suggests another way: If you say what the picture is showing, many contexts will be obvious by common sense. Example: A search for “someone smiling” could discover a photograph titled “a man helping his daughter take her first step”.
How does Cyc do it? It relies on combining several items known to it: when you become happy, you smile; you become happy when someone you love accomplishes a milestone; taking one's first step is a milestone; parents love their children; daughters are children; if a man has a daughter than he is her parent. While some natural-language understanding is involved in this process, the real strength of Cyc is in bringing together these items in a logical sequence that concludes it is highly likely that the man in the photograph is indeed smiling.
The State of Cyc Today
cyc knowledge pyramid (Credit: Cycorp)
Cyc has been around since 1984. It may be the world’s most ambitious and longest-lasting project. In fact, it was conceived in exactly this way: Leading researchers, such as Marvin Minsky, who were sympathetic to Doug Lenat’s ideas, warned that it would take a thousand person-years to get all the required knowledge into a computer. Typical AI academic projects usually have about five people working on them at a time, so the expected completion date was two centuries away. This drove Lenat to turn to the commercial world, where he expected that fifty people could complete the same task in just two decades. After ten years as part of MCC, Cyc was spun off into Cycorp, which is the focus of Cyc work today. Much of its activities are funded by government and private investors, though does sell software, knowledge in expertise for some commercial applications. Cycorp contributes some of its research as open source (OpenCyc) and a larger subset to the academic community
(ResearchCyc).
What does Cyc know today? In the overview given by Cyc, the top-level characterization is of “intangible things”, including events and ideas, and “individual”, including objects and events (yes, events are both individual and intangible). Other high-level categories include “space” and “time”, dealing with things about which you can ask “where?” or “when?”; and “agents”, dealing with things having desires and intentions as well as the ability to work towards their goals.
Deeper down, we find knowledge about weather, chemistry, natural and political geography, mechanical and electric devices, professions and occupations, and dozens of other categories. Each of these includes specific facts as well as more general concepts: for example, knowledge under “political geography” contains both information about specific towns and cities, and existence and implications of borders.
It is hard to find consistent statements regarding how many “assertions” (facts and knowledge items) Cyc has today, but there are definitely millions. Similarly, it is hard to find an estimate of how many more assertions are required before the project is comlpeted or how much longer this will take. We can ignore the fact that the originally-estimated two decades ended a few years back, The “1,000 person-years” forecast was never more than a very rough estimate. It seems like we’re still at the phase where it is difficult to predict when – or if – Cyc will be ready to deliver on its ambitious promises.
It does seem reasonable to expect that when this does happen, it will be sudden. Cyc will be so useful that it will be used in more and more contexts, and this will add size and momentum to the snowball as it receives – or learns for itself – more and more knowledge. When will this tipping point come? As is normal with tipping points, it’s very hard to tell until the tipping has already happened.
To me, it is more interesting to view Cyc as a process that is continually gathering new insights, as well as delivering some applications, which, while falling far below the full vision, are useful in themselves. For example, Lenat mentions in his Google lecture that Cyc has been dragged “kicking and screaming” into adding “higher-order logic”. This mathematical term has to do, among other things, with relationships between relationships, such as “many people don’t know that dolphins are mammals”: “dolphins are mammals” defines a relationship between dolphins and mammals; “many people don’t know that …” defines a relationship between people and the first relationship. In daily life we use much more complex knowledge of this kind. The fact that Cyc had to do this indicates a deep character of the knowledge we all have. Isn’t much of our everyday thinking concerned not with facts but with the effect of these facts on other facts and on the people who know – or don’t know – these facts?
Criticisms of Cyc
A.I. - symbolism v.s. connectionism
(Credit: University of Wisconsin)
If you've followed the path from answering pet-care questions to understanding interpersonal relationships (expecting the father in the picture to smile), you might feel that if a computer can really do all that, it has achieved human intelligence. Furthermore, you might also get the impression that nothing below human-level intelligence would actually suffice to do a good-enough job, unless the domains of discussion are sharply circumscribed (so that a limited amount of knowledge is enough). Lenat would agree, as Cyc's home page says “Cycorp's vision is to create the world's first true artificial intelligence, having both common sense and the ability to reason with it”.
There’s no question that this goal has not been reached yet. Lenat and his co-workers believe that the goal is achievable, and that they are near the point where the computer itself could increasingly take over many of the tasks of teaching itself how to understand and reason.
Not everyone agrees – in fact, large parts of the Artificial Intelligence community are deeply skeptical about Cyc’s goals, methods and technology. While there are many kinds of criticisms, I believe that the disagreement originates in a deep-rooted and old controversy in AI – symbol-based artificial intelligence versus connectionist approaches. Some trace this schism back to the core of philosophy, where symbolism supports the philosophy of Descartes while connectionism follows Heidegger’s critique of these ideas.
At the risk of over-simplification, let’s describe symbolism as the effort to describe every aspect of mental activity as dealing with symbols and the relationship between symbols. In Cyc, for example, “parents love their children” and “daughters are children” are statements linking four symbols (parents, children, daughters, love). Cognition, in this view, is a process of manipulating these symbols using a set of rules, as when the above statements may yield the conclusion that parents love their daughters. This is often called, especially by opponents, “GOFAI”, for “Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence”. Connectionism, on the other hand, starts not from symbolic descriptions that strive to model the real world, but from the real world itself. Cognition is then the reaction of interconnected units (such as neurons) to inputs from the real world, where the brain continually adjusts the connections between these units to achieve responses which are a better fit for the real world. For example, a better response could be one that made a better prediction of the next event detected by the senses.
Critics of Cyc typically use the same arguments used by connectionists against OFAI: can a symbolic description really capture the complexity and “messiness” of the real world? How do you deal with exceptions? Birds can generally fly, but what about flightless birds, dead birds, birds whose wings have been clipped, caged birds, and parrots in Monty Python sketches? Can we make a comprehensive list of all the exceptions to this rule? How about birds that can only fly short distances? In the statements “airplanes can fly” and “birds can fly”, should “fly” be represented as the same symbol or as two separate symbols?
Another aspect of the “messiness” of the real world is the many shades of meaning for just about any concept. Cyc currently holds about twenty semantically-distinct meanings of inclusion (“A is part of B”). Why not five, or fifty? How can what we know about one meaning of inclusion be used for another meaning of inclusion – and should it be used or would it generate wrong conclusions? When can we deduce that a specific parent does not love his or her children? What actions can we predict from the fact that X loves Y? Does it even make sense to identify “love” with a symbol with an agreed-upon meaning?
Can robots have common sense?A subtler set of issues revolves around how all this knowledge may be usable, even if it is correctly represented. As Herbert Dreyfus, one of the chief critics of GOFAI, says:
"Nowhere in the Encyclopedia Britannica does it say that people move forward more easily than they move backward". In case this seems frivolous, consider our reaction when we see someone walking backwards. The key point is, we’d notice something odd, and this would cause us to look for an explanation. Among many possible explanations, we may suspect that the person is walking away from some danger and decide to look in the direction where he’s looking. It could save our lives. It’s important to notice that knowing the fact mentioned by Dreyfus is not enough. Even in the limited arena of observations about movements of people, we should also state, for similar reasons, that people prefer walking to crawling, that they typically keep their hands hanging at the sides of their bodies, etc. Each of these facts could be used to predict “normal” movements and to detect the need for more explanations. “Why is this woman raising her hand while walking? Is she waving to anybody? Let’s look at the direction she’s waving” – in order to start this chain of thought, we need to remember that people usually don’t just happen to raise their hands while walking. It is even questionable whether we know how to state all the relevant facts about how people move. We can intuitively differentiate human walk from the walk of even the best-walking robots available today (one observer commented that Honda’s Asimo robot walks like a person who really needs to go to the bathroom). Can we explain to Cyc how we make this identification so quickly?
How would Cyc’s developers think of entering such a fact (“people move forward more easily than they move backward”) into their list of common-sense items? Remember that for this fact to be usable in reasoning we should also state some fact such as “when people have several ways to do something, they typically choose the easier way”. If Cyc developers don’t add these facts, could Cyc derive it from other items within its knowledge pool or from other information sources? As the above example shows, the lack of such facts, which are so obvious to us, could result in Cyc failing to make even apparently simple deductions. Such failures are well-known to users of Cyc and other similar, less-ambitious projects, many of whom believe that once some critical mass of knowledge has been achieved, the gaps will be automatically detected and filled in (possibly by Cyc asking humans to provide the missing pieces).
How would a connectionist approach teach a computer that people move forwards rather than backwards? It would let the computer teach itself, by observing the movements of many people in many situations (many AI researchers would say that there’s also a critical need here for the computer itself to “walk” – that is, to be embodied in a robot).
Let’s take a quick and simplified tour through the connectionist world:
Imagine that there’s a unit, within the large set of interconnected units, which has come (through earlier learning) to be strongly active when forward movement is observed; another unit associated with backward movement; and yet another one with human walk. I emphasize that the tagging of a unit – e.g. as identifying “human walk” – is only of interest for external investigation of these units:
the operation of the connected network of units does not need, understand or use this tagging. Over many observations, the computer will find that “human walk” is almost always active together with “forward movement”, and rarely active with “backward movement”. If this rare combination occurs, it will trigger other parts of the network to look for other experiences matching this combination. In other words, attention will be drawn to something after it is discovered that it is an unexpected combination. If no earlier observations can be retrieved, the observations may be decomposed into their constituent details.
For example, the head’s direction may be ignored as a useless additional detail when the observed person is both moving and looking forwards – it is added into the “moving forward” activation. However, when attention has been focused by the unexpected pattern of unit activation, units which are activated by direction of gaze would receive a stronger signal. Eventually, this could yield the kind of reaction we’re expecting. I say “could yield” because I don’t know of any connectionist project that has demonstrated such success within real-world, unbounded situations like the ones Cyc is targeting.
There are also criticisms based on mathematical theories of logic.
Mechanisms for handling exceptions, as well as for handling the higher-order logic discussed above, involve types of mathematical logic for which there are theoretical limitations regarding completeness and consistency.
The “completeness” problem implies that there could be facts which are deducible from Cyc’s knowledge, but which Cyc would never discover (this is not the same as the simpler problem of completeness, which questions whether Cyc would ever have enough facts in order to have reliable “common sense”). The “consistency” problem means that it is theoretically possible that Cyc would be able to use parts of its knowledge to decide that some claim is true, while other parts of its knowledge lead it to deduce that the same claim is false. The only known way to prove that this would never happen is to drastically limit the rate and type of knowledge creation as well as limiting knowledge content – an unacceptable solution. Cyc’s developers took the middle road: They decided to allow contradictions between different bodies of knowledge, each of which is dedicated to one kind of “expertise”, while striving towards internal consistency in each such body. Regarding theoretical objections, Cyc counters that it is an engineering project which should be judged by empirical evaluation of results.
Furthermore, if we’re trying to create human-level intelligence, shouldn’t we allow for some incompleteness and inconsistency – especially if there might be reason to believe that these are the costs of achieving real
Machine intelligence?
Lastly, GOFAI simply doesn’t “feel right” for many people. It does not feel like what we’re doing when we’re thinking, and unlike connectionism it has very little biological support.
Most Cyc supporters and critics would at least agree about one thing: If a computer accomplishes the goals of properly using common sense in a real-world setting, regardless of whether it was achieved using symbolism, connectionism or something else, it will have become human in many ways. Shortly thereafter, it will become superhuman, if only in its capability to process and use far more information than any human or any group of humans ever could.
Amazingly, the protagonists of The Two Faces of Tomorrow, written in 1979, who started with the deceptively simple question of how to get a computer to understand why cats shouldn’t be burned, face exactly this possibility by the end of the book. Only time will tell whether this is a coincidence or a hint of future developments.For further discussion of A.I. and common sense see the TFOT forums.
About the author:
Israel Beniaminy has a Bachelor’s degree in Physics and Computer Science, and a Graduate degree in Computer Science. He develops advanced optimization techniques at ClickSoftware technologies, and has published academic papers on numerical analysis, approximation algorithms and artificial intelligence, as well as articles on fault isolation, service management and optimization in industry magazines.
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Is not this all about how the printing press eventually was used to shape opinions?
With the internet breaking the virtual monopoly of centralized mass media resulting from decades of infiltration and ownership considation, ala SMOM William Randolf Hearst, technology such as this being developed by Doug Lenat/Cycorp would be a logical tool for effectuating this sort of censorship through the internet.
IOW would not it be invaluable for thwarting the spread of ideas considered dangerious by the ruling ancient regime?
Jesuitical Drug War
Published May 4, 2008 in my companion blog Freedom of Medicine and Diet
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/05/jesuitical-drug-policy-treason_04.html
From my unpublished manuscript "Coca Forgotten Medicine"
A Foreign Military Order's Un-Constitutional Rule & Treason to Humanity through the Jesuit Order Run Georgetown University, the U.S. State Department and the National Institute [for promoting] Drug Abuse
Rome's Anti-Christ Coca-ine Prohibition
http://continuingcounterreformation.blogspot.com/2008/07/roman-catholic-church-cocaine.html
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/05/jesuitical-drug-policy-treason_04.html
From my unpublished manuscript "Coca Forgotten Medicine"
A Foreign Military Order's Un-Constitutional Rule & Treason to Humanity through the Jesuit Order Run Georgetown University, the U.S. State Department and the National Institute [for promoting] Drug Abuse
The allegiance to the drug control status quo was prevalent from the onset throughout the Clinton Administration’s bureaucracies, as has been the case with either the Democrat or Republican Parties throughout the 1900s. I found it typified by two Washington, D.C. meetings held on successive days in July 1993, some 6 months into the then new Clinton Administration, with the official presentations and responses at the Q&A sessions indicating how truth was beholden to this false ideology.
The first of these events was a plenary panel organized by the U.S. State Department and the like-wise Jesuit Order run Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies. The second one was a workshop panel held during the multi-day conference by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (N.I.D.A.).
The State Department-Georgetown University event was titled "Multilateralism and Drugs", and was held July 15, 1993 at the Rayburn U.S. House of Representatives Office Building. Its speakers included Yale University’s David Musto, and Timothy E. Wirth, U.S. President Clinton’s appointee as Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs.
At this event, Musto admitted a fact that he would leave out of his Readers' Digest style articles: that dilute cocaine alkaloid containing Coca beverages such as Vin Mariani, were not problematic.
Wirth, previously a U.S. Representative and later a Senator from Colorado, was described as the Clinton Administration’s point man on everything from refugees to global warming, and described in glowing terms by newspapers such as The Washington Post, as a “reformer”, was there to give a speech titled “New Approaches to Global Drug Problems”. So I figured that he would be a good person to ask about the Coca issue, which I did at that panel’s Q and A period:Douglas Willinger- Question: Sir, you mentioned crop eradication -- Coca eradication -- as the solution but have you consider the alternative. Instead of crop substitution, why not cocaine conversion- that is, remove the things creating this bad situation, having coca tea in supermarkets rather than crack in the streets. Indeed, sir, what about Bolivia's recent proposal to review the effects of Coca, and adjusting the laws accordingly if need be?The NIDA event, a workshop panel Update on Drugs- Cocaine and Stimulants, was held at the second day of the U.S. N.I.D.A. National Conference on Drug Abuse Research and Practice; An Alliance for the 21st Century. It featured a number of speakers, including a Dr. Millwood, all testifying to the dangers of cocaine. One of the presenters spoke about brain damage with combined cocaine and alcohol use, including its metabolization of cocaethyline. All in all, while their prognosis upon cocaine was negative, I heard little to no mention of actual doses. From memory, as NIDA is uncooperative with public requests for such transcripts:
Timothy Wirth- Answer: Did I talk about crop eradication? Do I have to answer that? You sound like one of those Hemp people! Next question.In other words, cocaine was a highly toxic-addictive drug in doses dangerous with any stimulant. They had no showing that it was anymore toxic then other naturally occurring stimulants caffeine and nicotine, in like contexts. Cocaine, Caffeine and Nicotine are all alkaloids that serve as CNS stimulants found in minute amounts in such plants as Coca, Coffee and Tobacco.Douglas Willinger- Question: Question of dosage and paradigm. You speak of the dangers of cocaine and alcohol, but could you please elaborate as to the dosages? What stimulant would not be harmful in such does? Is cocaine itself anymore toxic as asides from the concentrated forms as developed under prohibition.
Dr. Millwood- Answer: About 1 ¼ gallon of vodka and an eight ball of pharmaceutical grade cocaine hci snorted in one night. Well, uh yes, we just don't think it's that important, let's change the subject, okay?!
As licit drugs, they are taken through the use of the parent substance, or in isolated form in a mode of delivery of a pharmaceutical preparation, e.g. caffeine as No Doz or Vivarin tablets largely consisting of mannitol, and more recently various nicotine chewing gums and patches.
As an illicit drug under a prohibition of Coca leaves and cocaine, with penalties based upon the contraband’s gross weight, the amount of cocaine use is significantly reduced, but the amount of cocaine taken per dose may be higher, with the concentration definitely far higher in doses of the type more akin to produce the big bang favored by these drug law’s economics, with prohibition driving up concentration and prices hence promoting the justification for the price- e.g. spending $50 or $100 for a chewing gum package sized foil of white powder is more justified by the pronounced effects of doses that are more dangerous in every way: larger more concentrated and more direct.
And this is popularly supported as somehow fighting drug abuse!
Such a drug policy regimen that suppresses a safer substance for the sake of a one intrinsically dangerous, that is the adulterated, misbranded cigarettes undeniably benefited by this criminal mercantilism, underwent no visible criticism within the room where Mr. Wirth brushed aside my question. This was also so in the room where Dr. Millwood would answer my question about the amount of cocaine needed to produce the toxicities he discussed, but not answer my second question about the silence in the drug abuse research industry over maintains the drug control policy that stops Coca while promoting concentrated cocaine. One could only imagine if either Wirth and Millwood, nor the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services N.I.D.A. had even given any thought about whether such anti-Coca leaf policies were reconcilable with any stance respecting either the public's health, let alone the human rights of the millions of Andeans who consider Coca eradication an infringement upon their individual and their cultural rights, in this day and age of moral certainty. I suppose they simply care less for that then appeasing their masters that gave them their jobs.Georgetown University's Jesuit Order's Underappreciated 20th Century Role
Rome's Anti-Christ Coca-ine Prohibition
http://continuingcounterreformation.blogspot.com/2008/07/roman-catholic-church-cocaine.html
Drug Warriors Disregard Pharmacokinetics
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/drug-warriors-ignore-pharmacokinetics.html
Drug War Promotes Drug Abuse
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/drug-war-promotes-drug-abuse-over-drug.html
Drug War Criminal Mercantilsm to Protect Cigarette Industry
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/it-was-criminal-mercantilism-to-protect.html
Drug War Criminal Mercantilism Public Health Subversion
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/criminal-mercantilism-public-health.html
Drug War Criminal Mercantilism
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/search/label/criminal%20mercantilism
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